Hi Arby,
Tried to read all of this thread , hadn't been here lately. But from what I understand you are looking for programs to rip CD's to .wav, .mp3, or whatever.
Here is a program I use, it is free and when I found and used it, I think I deleted all others. It will rip, convert mp3 to wav/wav to mp3 - record - lots of things. You should take a look at it and try it out.
---------------
Cdex Ver 1.40
---------------
Also as noted above, the 128 is pretty much the standard unless you have lots of hard drive capacity to use up quickly.